“My middle name is Malon, which was my father’s Christian name, but I never used it, because each time I did I had to explain that it was pronounced May-lon.”

“Good thinking.”

The table was set, and they were called to lunch. “Where are Dino and Viv?” Rose asked.

“They went riding and took a picnic lunch with them.”

“Good. I have you all to myself.”

“Entirely.”

“Any other questions?”

“How does MI-6 list your name in their records?”

Rose sighed. “I suppose they would have listed it somewhere as Balfour. I was a student at the time. Mind you, if they knew you knew that, they’d take you out and shoot you.”

“That’s what they’d like you to think,” Stone said. “What did you do for them as a student?”

“Watched out for communists, of course. They still haven’t recovered from that nest of spies at Oxford and Cambridge. Kim Philby is a name that still raises temperatures at MI-6.”

“Did you report any communists?”

“Only two, and they were both well-known to be members of the Young Communist League, so I wasn’t really giving anything away.”

“Did they ever call on you for other services?”

“They keep a list of medical types that they believe to be reliable. Once, at their request, I removed a bullet from a young man’s arse.”

“One of theirs or one of yours?”

“I never asked, and they never told me. As soon as I had stitched him up and given him a dose of antibiotics, they spirited him away. I never saw his face, since I was working at the other end.”

“How did you fall into the clutches of Roger Fife-Simpson?”

“I met him at Station Two a week before I met you. The service asked me to go up there and give some basic wound-repair instruction to a small group of spies-in-training—applying tourniquets, setting broken limbs, stitching up oranges, that sort of thing—nothing an Eagle Scout couldn’t handle.”

“What do you think of the man?”

“I think of him very little. I don’t suppose I spoke to him or was spoken to more than three or four times, including dinner here.”

“Felicity thinks you are his creature,” Stone said.

“Hardly. He’s not the sort I’d like to be the creature of. There was talk about him in the mess. He’s apparently a very efficient killer with almost any sort of weapon. There was a story about him dealing with some IRA types in Belfast.”

“I heard that story. Impressive, if true. Do you know what he did before landing at MI-6?”

“Not a clue. I had the impression at dinner that the landing wasn’t Felicity’s idea.”

“I have that impression, too.”

“He must have some connections in the government, though—probably the Foreign Office, since someone there foisted him upon Felicity.”

“Where did you hear that?”